Again

Posted On 09 Nov 2017 / 0 Comment

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I’ve written so many of these stories by now, I just don’t know what to do differently. I think I’ll start where I usually end. No, I don’t have any answer to the ongoing wave of gun violence. But I am 100 percent convinced that doing nothing isn’t working…

…This time it was a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. A lone gunman killed 26 people and left 20 more wounded in the worst mass shooting in Texas history. Most of this massacre was captured on the church’s video system, which regularly records services and posts videos online…

…Devin Patrick Kelley, the Sutherland Springs Shooter, should never have been able to buy guns legally. We now know that Kelley escaped from a mental health facility after sneaking guns onto an Air Force base and threatening his commanders. We also know that he beat a former wife, abused his former stepson, posted on social media about his rifle and his affinity for mass shootings, and disturbed a neighbor for several mornings in a row with rapid-fire gunshots. Kelley was a textbook case… the kind of person you want kept away from firearms…

…A little over a month ago, on the night of October 1, a gunman opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Fifty-eight people were killed and an additional 546 were injured. Stephen Paddock, of Mesquite, Nevada, fired hundreds of rounds from multiple weapons in his suite at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. The Las Vegas incident is the deadliest mass shooting committed by an individual in the United States…

…While it is understandable that we look at current gun laws, screening, and preventing guns from getting into the wrong hands, the facts are pretty simple. America has an astronomical number of guns. Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings were American, according to a study by Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama…

…Worldwide, according to Lankford’s study, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This correlation held up even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he adjusted for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence…

…So we sit here, protected by our Second Amendment rights… waiting for our country’s next mass shooting. It’s not a matter of “if.” It’s a matter of “when” and “where.” As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have an answer. I think it’s plain to see that our lawmakers aren’t having the right conversations. All of the post facto “thoughts and prayers” don’t do a bit of good for the families of mass shooting victims. We, as a nation, have to do a much better job of making sure that people who shouldn’t own guns can’t get them. If that’s a bit of an inconvenience, so be it. It’s either that or continue to accept that mass shootings are just part of living in the United States. We have to do better than that. We have to be a better nation than that…